Please wait...
July 23, 2010 by Sonia Isard
The Spin Cycle: Shirley Sherrod Shifts the Paradigm
Welcome back to The Spin Cycle, Lilith’s online forum for media analysis.
Racism, sexism, and the real-life political power of modern media played out with a vengeance this week in the total horror-show of Shirley Sherrod’s firing from her position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Over twenty years ago, this woman of color publicly struggled to come to terms with the personal implications of the systemic racism that defined her childhood and later civil rights work.
Then, this week, Fox News repeatedly aired a decontextualized and heavily edited clip, purporting to prove Sherrod’s anti-white racism, based on a lecture she had given at the NAACP. Sherrod was then summarily hung out to dry by the conservative media machine, the federal government, and the NAACP.
Later retractions aside, these initial reactions mark a gut-wrenching willingness to willfully ignore the past and present role of race and racism, and gender and sexism, in American society.
- No Comments
July 21, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
A Room of One’s Own, In Time
There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker magazine a couple of weeks ago; it pictures a mother driving with her three kids in the back seat. The kids were hollering, fighting, and, one could safely assume, had very sticky fingers. The mother’s eyes were narrow slits in the rear-view mirror. The bumper sticker or the back of the car reads: I’d rather be working.
Over the past six weeks, during which I have been home with my newborn and two young children, one of whom is being toilet trained, I admit to hatching numerous plans to escape to my quiet office and its spacious rooms, far from the unquenchable, insatiable mouths of babes. But now, as the midpoint of my maternity leave is incomprehensibly already behind me, I contemplate returning to work with apprehension. Is it possible that this period of time is almost over? That to these days which fold over each other and melt together, clouded in the haze of interrupted sleep, will be added the extra responsibility of functioning in the work world? (more…)
- 1 Comment
July 21, 2010 by admin
Letter from Jerusalem: Listening on the next generation of Conservative women rabbis
“Get yourself a teacher, acquire for yourself a friend.” – Pirkei Avot 1:6
Blessed are You, God, who clothes the naked. My mother’s closet is full of clothing from various eras of her life. Suits hang in every jewel-tone from decades of shul-going. She has even saved her Bat Mitzvah dress, yellowed lace with patches of pastel. When I was younger, I used to love playing dress-up in her closet, awaiting the day I would grow into her clothes.
Among the diverse discussion topics when a group of women rabbinical students gathered in Jerusalem living rooms this past year was the contents of our own closets: how we see ourselves and how we are seen; the ways we choose to cover and uncover; the garments we have inherited and those we have taken upon ourselves. My hevruta (study partner), Kerrith Solomon, and I convened this group of women from the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Ziegler school so we could talk with our peers about things we have not yet had safe space to explore within our schooling, reclaiming and exploring our identities as women on our paths toward the rabbinate in the Conservative Movement. (more…)
- 2 Comments
July 19, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin
Hope for Deliverance
“I don’t like to think about the future. It freaks me out,” my nine-year-old daughter Rachel announces from the back of the car. She stopped using a booster seat a month ago, her height finally sufficient to require a simple seat belt.
Her announcement is in response to a Scholastic News article. Her third-grade class had read that morning about water found on the moon and the possibility of people making their homes there one day.
I ask Rachel if she would like that and receive her vehement reply. I am driving us home after her after-school program and my trying day at work. The day has also brought the news my mother’s blood pressure had shot up, and multiple phone calls with the insurance company about a biopsy I needed a month ago. Thankfully it turned out benign but left me with a claim mix-up I could use Columbo to unravel.
I brake for a red light. “Are you concerned about growing up or the future of the world?” (more…)
- No Comments
July 13, 2010 by admin
New Podcast: The Jewish Women's Roundtable!
New podcast from the Jewish Women’s Roundtable, a collaboration between Lilith and the Forward’s Sisterhood blog.
Here, the Forward’s web editor Gabrielle Birkner talks with Lilith editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider, Lilith assistant editor Sonia Isard, and the Forward’s editor, Jane Eisner. Listen in on our conversation on everything from Jewish anti-choice organizations, to a new pitch for a reality television show, to our own “click” moments.
[display_podcast]
Enjoy! And join in the conversation in the comments section below.
- 3 Comments
July 13, 2010 by Sonia Isard
The Spin Cycle: Man Walks into a Blurb
Hi again, and welcome back to The Spin Cycle, Lilith’s online forum for media analysis. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Say you’re a man. Say you’re an Israeli man. Say you’re an Israeli man writing a novel in Hebrew. Say the novel’s about a woman. Say you’d like some people to buy your book. Who writes your blurb?
I was taken aback over the weekend when I read on the Guardian’s book blog about some recent writing from Nicole Krauss. Not about her new novel, or a rehash of her “Twenty Under Forty” short for the New Yorker, but about a blurb she wrote for David Grossman’s new novel. A blurb?
The Guardian, a massive British news outlet, found Krauss’s blurb “strikingly effusive,” and, apparently, pretty hilarious. “Our challenge for you today is to outdo Krauss,” the moderator urges, inspiring tons of comments parodying Krauss.
I’d expect this kind of gleeful snark from the gossip blogs, where mockery is the money-maker. But here we have the intersection of the old media Guardian meeting its new media offspring, meeting serious literature, meeting a publishing industry that is literally dying to sell its books in print. (more…)
- 1 Comment
July 8, 2010 by Sonia Isard
The Spin Cycle: Feminist blogs: Feminist? blogs?
Hello, friends of the Lilith blog, and welcome to The Spin Cycle! This is Sonia, your friendly neighborhood moderator. I’ll be posting regularly about my thoughts on the media and (post-?)modernity from a Jewish feminist perspective. Can’t wait to hear your feedback!
The blogosphere lit up this week in a small flurry of virtual feminist theorizing, when blogger and Brooklynite Emily Gould denounced (though not for the first time) a subsidiary of Gawker Media, the (debatably) feminist website, Jezebel.
In a vaguely Ouroborosian twist (I thought my Google-Reader might implode from an overload of self-referentiality), Gould writes provocatively about “How feminist blogs like Jezebel gin up page views by exploiting women’s worst tendencies:” (more…)
- No Comments
July 7, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under the Sun: Mmmm… Delicious!
What Lilith publishes really has legs! Just look! Check out this item from today’s news, and then read what Lilith said earlier on this very subject.
“Men eat meat, women eat chocolate”—at least, that’s what Riddhi Shah writes at salon.com this week. But what happens when the already complex relationship between food and gender is complicated even further by romance—and religion? Find out what Lilith contributor Cynthia Graber thinks, in her 2009 feature, “When Food and Love Collide.”
- No Comments
July 6, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
She’s A Boy
A month ago, a day after our son was born, my husband brought our “big girls,” ages 4 and 2, to visit me and the newborn in the hospital. “You have a baby brother!” I said to them. The big one, already old enough to know that boys have cooties, lamented the fact that it wasn’t a baby sister. The little one peered into his glass hospital basinet. “She’s a boy?” she asked.
Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been surprised at the reactions, including my own, to the fact that a male child was born into our family. I have been overwhelmed by the rituals and practices that surround the birth of a baby boy. I gave birth on a Wednesday, and came home on a Friday afternoon, exhausted, and ready to cocoon. That very night, though, while I nursed upstairs, our living and dining rooms were filled with guests; well-wishers who came to sing, tell stories, give blessings, and eat chick-peas. This traditional event, called a Shalom Zachor, which takes place on the first Friday night after a male child is born, is an opportunity for the members of the community to come and welcome the new child. It is an event that takes place only for boys; girls are welcomed into the Jewish people immediately by virtue of their birth. But since the boy has not yet been circumcised, he is, supposedly, despondent, and is cheered up only when throngs of people descend upon his exhausted parents’ house.
My husband and I hadn’t even wanted to partake in this ritual, but gentle communal encouragement won us over. And I must admit, that, as I sat upstairs, listening to the familiar voices of friends singing and sharing words of Torah, I felt a surge of, could it be, maternal pride, and had a few private moments of clucking around like a proud chicken; I had produced a male heir. I couldn’t help but feel that all of these people were here to celebrate me, and that I had done something right in giving birth to a boy.
This was reinforced in the wider world as well. When I was leaving the hospital with the bundle in my arms, a woman smiled at me in the elevator. “Is it your first?” she asked. I told her that I had two girls at home. “Well,” she said, “you’ve finally got your boy.” In fact, when I gave birth to our second daughter, the nurses wished me well when I was leaving, and said, “see you next year.” When I raised my eyebrows they smiled – “well, aren’t you going to try for a boy?”
Do we still live in a world in which it matters whether or not you give birth to a boy or a girl? Is there something particularly to be celebrated, in the Jewish community and beyond, when a male child is born? Or is it simply that after having two of “the same,” what is recognized is having something “different?” And what does my moment of clucking maternal pride say about me? Am I simply reacting to communal forces that, despite myself, have affected me? Or am I carrying hidden stereotypes that I have never expressed, even to myself? And how do I navigate that, as a mother?
I’m not sure yet. In the meantime, though, I’m reluctantly introducing male pronouns into my daughters’ vocabularies.
-Maya Bernstein
- 2 Comments
July 1, 2010 by admin
Nothing New Under the Sun: The Body Politic
What Lilith publishes really has legs! Just look! Check out this item from today’s news, and then read what Lilith said earlier on this very subject.
ABC’s new family drama, HUGE, has sparked some great out-of-the-box conversations about representations of the body in the mainstream media. As Ginia Bellafante writes in this week’s New York Times, HUGE “stands in some sympathy with a rebellion mounted against so many hours of ‘The Biggest Loser'”–a reality show and weight-loss competition.
Here at Lilith, we’re excited to hear these murmurs circulating because, as Barbara Gingold has written in our pages, “The body itself is a woman’s form of language.” Critical thinking about questions of body image, weight, dieting, and size-ism has long been important to Jewish feminists on the front lines of progressive thought and on the front pages of our magazine. For a sampling of Lilith writing on the subject, check out “Fat Talk” from 2001, and then browse through the treasures in Lilith’s rich archives for related articles. And tell us what you think! What have your own experiences been like?
- No Comments